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eccerr0r
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 Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2021 2:58 pm Post subject: |
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I wish it were clear which SD cards/USB sticks were "optimized" for FAT... so I can avoid it...
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dmpogo
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Location: Canada
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| Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2021 1:18 am Post subject: |
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| eccerr0r wrote: | | I wish it were clear which SD cards/USB sticks were "optimized" for FAT... so I can avoid it... |
I never use anything but FAT on USB sticks - why bother changing is one thing, the other - I never know what Windows or Mac machine I will need to stick them in |
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eccerr0r
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| Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2021 2:10 am Post subject: |
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Live boot media is the main reason for me. Though this is more for SD cards (think RPi), I do have one live Gentoo install on a USB stick, though it's kind of old now, haven't updated it in long time...
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figueroa
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| Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2021 3:29 am Post subject: |
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Probably veering off topic, mainly I use USB flash drives for compressed, encrypted, off-site backups on large (128 and 256 GB) USB 3 drives, and only occasionally giving or receiving files from others on relatively small USB 2 drives in their original vfat format. The large backup drives are ext4.
About half of my large USB 3 flash drives (major and minor brand names) have been slower than dirt. Most makers don't seem to have any respect for them. The fastest have been the Samsung Bar Plus 64 GB and larger. They are about twice as fast as the best of the rest. They are a credit to the brand name.
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Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
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Tony0945
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Joined: 25 Jul 2006
Posts: 5127
Location: Illinois, USA
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| Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2021 2:00 pm Post subject: |
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[quote="dmpogo"] | eccerr0r wrote: |
I never use anything but FAT on USB sticks - why bother changing is one thing, the other - I never know what Windows or Mac machine I will need to stick them in |
I have one stick as FAT for transferring data (mostly video files) betwee Gentoo and virtualbox Windows. Evey long term store is ext4 for reliability. |
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Tony0945
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Joined: 25 Jul 2006
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| Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2021 2:01 pm Post subject: |
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| figueroa wrote: | | The fastest have been the Samsung Bar Plus 64 GB and larger. They are about twice as fast as the best of the rest. They are a credit to the brand name. |
Thank you for the recommendation. |
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dmpogo
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| Posted: Mon Oct 25, 2021 5:06 am Post subject: |
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[quote="Tony0945"] | dmpogo wrote: | | eccerr0r wrote: |
I never use anything but FAT on USB sticks - why bother changing is one thing, the other - I never know what Windows or Mac machine I will need to stick them in |
I have one stick as FAT for transferring data (mostly video files) betwee Gentoo and virtualbox Windows. Evey long term store is ext4 for reliability. |
Makes sense. I do not do long term storage on USB sticks - I use them to run around colleagues and conferences with presentations and data swapping if needed ( and most of my colleagues use Macs) |
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happosai
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Joined: 17 Aug 2005
Posts: 43
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| Posted: Thu Nov 04, 2021 9:03 am Post subject: |
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| The_Great_Sephiroth wrote: |
Zucca, how is BTRFS "slow"? It always comes up close tot he top in speed tests on everything I have seen, both on Phoronix and other sites. It is faster than NTFS on my gaming rig (I use the Windows port of BTRFS since ReFS is only for businesses now) and unless we're talking specifically about single SSD usage, I am confused. I generally use BTRFS on single HDDs in DUP mode with compression, multiple HDDs in RAID, or on multiple SSDs in RAID. I will NOT use it on a single SSD which is where BTRFS does indeed get slow. |
You never put a RDBMS on Btrfs, like e.g. MySQL or Postgresql, did you? Or tried to run virtual machines from it...
Of course Btrfs is slower, since it has to do more stuff for normal operations compared to other file systems. Checksumming does not come without some cost, simple as that. Also one of its core features, snapshots, has the reputation of being quite slow when trying to remove one.
There are enough people outside who tried PostgreSQL on ZFS and are quite happy with it, while for Btrfs its own developers warn you to put a database on it.
Overall for many standard work loads Btrfs is significantly slower compared to Ext4/XFS. There are more than enough reasons for sticking with ext4/XFS for many people.
The other thing is that Btrfs in theory has a huge feature catalogue, for which you've got to in reality always follow the status updates to figure out which stuff is working, working somewhat or still broken and will eat your data. And many people are just not willing to do just that, they expect that a stable file system performs stable with all of its features. |
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Marlo
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| Posted: Thu Nov 04, 2021 9:58 am Post subject: |
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| figueroa wrote: | | ... the Samsung Bar Plus 64 GB and larger. They are about twice as fast as the best of the rest. They are a credit to the brand name. |
Also from me a big thank you for the tip.
As a result, I bought a stick with 256 GB directly from Samsung for 35 €. The drive is formatted by the manufacturer with exFAT.
With exFAT a data exchange between Mac, Win and Linux is possible without problems.
And the price is OK
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The_Great_Sephiroth
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Joined: 03 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Mon Dec 13, 2021 5:28 am Post subject: |
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Mine use exFAT also, unless I boot off of it. Then it is whatever the ISO I put on the drive uses. I have seen NTFS for Windows install media.
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NeddySeagoon
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Joined: 05 Jul 2003
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| Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2021 10:33 am Post subject: |
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[Moderator note: danielfrans posted post 8685815 just above this one, and Neddy answered it in good faith. danielfrans later edited the post to contain spam links, so the post was split and sent to the Dustbin. Neddy's response is generally informative, so I left it here even though the post it is answering is gone. -Hu]
danielfrans,
f2fs was developed before wear levelling made its way into SSD firmware.
On a new SSD, ext4 will be fine. On an older SSD or SD card, its hard to tell.
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figueroa
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Joined: 14 Aug 2005
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| Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2021 2:38 pm Post subject: |
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| danielfrans wrote: | | what the recomended file system |
Welcome to the Gentoo forums. Read the whole thread. Recommended for what, by whom? There isn't one answer.
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Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
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The_Great_Sephiroth
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| Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2021 7:53 pm Post subject: |
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| NeddySeagoon wrote: | danielfrans,
f2fs was developed before wear levelling made its way into SSD firmware.
On a new SSD, ext4 will be fine. On an older SSD or SD card, its hard to tell. |
Neddy, F2FS states that it helps with wear-leveling even on modern SSDs. With over a year of using F2FS I can tell you that it is faster than ext4 on an SSD and it has fewer write cycles, so I ASSUME the drive will last longer or at least perform better.
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paraw
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Joined: 07 Jan 2005
Posts: 158
Location: Coventry (UK)
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| Posted: Sun Dec 26, 2021 12:40 pm Post subject: |
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| You may want to have a look at this bug as well. Eventually, I got really annoyed with upstream and just stopped trying to reason with them. |
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figueroa
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Joined: 14 Aug 2005
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Location: Edge of marsh USA
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| Posted: Sun Dec 26, 2021 3:46 pm Post subject: |
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| The_Great_Sephiroth wrote: | ...
Neddy, F2FS states that it helps with wear-leveling even on modern SSDs. With over a year of using F2FS I can tell you that it is faster than ext4 on an SSD and it has fewer write cycles, so I ASSUME the drive will last longer or at least perform better. |
Share link please. Sounds more like opportunity for conflict.
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Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi |
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Goverp
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| Posted: Mon Dec 27, 2021 11:34 am Post subject: |
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| paraw wrote: | | You may want to have a look at this bug as well. Eventually, I got really annoyed with upstream and just stopped trying to reason with them. |
fsck-ing on boot is interesting. Neddy Seagoon often points out that if your drive has problems, the last thing you should do is run fsck, as it will destroy information that you might need to recover some data (depending on the disk damage).
We run fsck at boot time to recover, or rather eliminate meta-data inconsistencies, after an incomplete closedown that left some I/O operations in-flight (and most likely lost as they were only in the write cache). This behaviour has been "best practice" since the early days of ext2 and probably before that. But I remember talking to some database gurus who pointed out that a database always checks and replays its journal at startup, so if you trust the journal there was no point in running a "proper" closedown - the database would do much the same work if you just pulled the plug. That relies on having a reliable journal.
Consider the current state of ext4. Default is data=ordered,so if you pull the plug, fsck will ensure the filesystem metadata is consistent with what's been written to disk, but data in buffers is irretrievably lost, so it's not clear what you're recovering. If you want to recover in-flight I/O, you need data=journal.
f2fs is a journal file-system What's written to disk IS the journal. I suspect that's why there's no boot-time fsck -there's nothing to recover. The reason for running fsck.f2fs is to check the FS for consistency, so its something you might want to do occasionally, but not regularly (any more than you'd run full-check mode "fsck.ext4 -f"). That said,it's still a pain that you couldn't use the boot-time fsck combined with a filesystem tuning option to set the max count between full checks.
I think there's been some progress; AFAIK Arch linux handles boot-time fsck'ing f2fs filesystems, but what's going on is hidden in a a raft of systemd startup and I've not worked out what's going on. On Gentoo, I use an initramfs and OpenRc, so I just have a step in its script to run an fsck, and manually run "fsck.f2fs -f" occasionally (usually on a change of linux kernel version).
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NeddySeagoon
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| Posted: Mon Dec 27, 2021 12:30 pm Post subject: |
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The original driver for f2fs was to extend drive life where wear levelling was primitive or non existent.
Read some old posts here about users destroying 4G and 8G SSDs in new eeePC's before the Gentoo install was complete.
For lots of reasons, drive life has been extended since the early days. One of mine, that builds Gentoo on an irregular basis, should last about 80 years using ext4.
That's long enough so I don't care, as I'm a pensioner already. :)
If it lasted 10 years, I wouldn't care either. It will be long out of date and far too small to be useful by then anyway.
It might outlast me too but that's not the point. As long as the drive outlasts its useful life, the filesystem doesn't matter.
If data recovery is a problem, you need a UPS, not a different filesystem.
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NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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psycho
Guru
Joined: 22 Jun 2007
Posts: 534
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2021 4:51 am Post subject: |
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| NeddySeagoon wrote: | | You can even make music with the head steppers. |
That's one of the best uses of retro tech I've ever seen. I found it quite hard to toss out all my old 3.5" floppy drives (I still remember coveting the IBM JX when I saw it with these instead of the familiar 5.25" drives) but accepted in the end that they just had no use anymore, and dumped crates of them. I didn't think of turning them into an orchestra though.
Every couple of years I have another think about the advantages of other filesystems and another look at performance tests and so on, and consider switching from ext4, but in the end I always wind up sticking with ext4. I think what Hu said about workflows is exactly right: I've already got so many routines in place (around things like standardised partition layouts and sizes) that I can see would be unnecessary with a modern FS (I suspect I'd be better off replacing this workflow with a new one involving snapshots etc.); but, it all works easily and reliably for me so I've never quite felt motivated enough to let ext4 go and start doing things differently. I guess I should set up a couple of BTRFS boxes and just have a play with its features.
I've never used f2fs and don't think I'm likely to bother: my SSDs are all modern and seem to cope pretty well without a dedicated FS, and my flash cards usually need to be vfat/exfat/ntfs for whatever other gadgets are using them. |
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fredbear5150
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 11 Oct 2003
Posts: 113
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| Posted: Mon Jan 24, 2022 10:09 am Post subject: |
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| The_Great_Sephiroth wrote: | | Ext4 is good, but it is dated. Slower than F2FS on solid-state media, far less feature-rich than BTRFS. There are many others which work better also. |
Can you define your usage of the term "dated" here into ones that an engineer like me can understand?
I don't believe that just because a piece of software is "old" that that makes it ripe for replacement by something else - otherwise we would not still be using vim, emacs, sed, awk and many other tools with a long history in Linux.
There's one very good reason why "old" is very good - because it usually also means "reliable" and that in turn usually means "used extensively". For someone like me who both runs his own (Gentoo) Linux systems and works on customer (Red Hat) Linux systems, my "lowest common denominator" approach means that I can learn one set of tools but apply them everywhere.
I don't understand people who treat software like "fashion accessories" - zsh, fish, f2fs, nano, etc. When you go working on other people's systems, you're not going to find those applications installed and you may have no capability to install them just for you to use either.
The "engineer's approach" is to learn bash, ext4. sed, awk and the other "classic" tools that "just work", have a proven stability and reliability, and mean you only have to learn one thing to achieve a specific task across any system. |
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NeddySeagoon
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| Posted: Mon Jan 24, 2022 1:23 pm Post subject: |
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fredbear5150,
You missed out FORTRAN :)
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NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
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Installing Gentoo
